Orthogonality of Sines and Cosines

This example comes from [1], Section 9.2, Modeling with First Order Equations.

This Demonstration shows the orthogonality of sines and cosines.

For any and ,

.

For ,

,

.

For ,

,

.

As you change and , you can see graphically that the areas above and below the axis cancel out in the first three cases. The orthogonal properties of sine and cosine are used in the solution of some classes of partial differential equations in terms of Fourier series.